Sunday, June 12, 2016

Long Live the Queen - 9/20 hours

Playing games has been a bit sporadic of late. I'm in the middle of looking for a new apartment. The chaos of having to move has been pretty stressful, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that a game where you can be unexpectedly murdered at any moment may not be the most welcome influence at this time. Regular posting will resume in a couple of weeks when things get settled down a bit more (fingers crossed).

Of course, it's possible to overstate the case. A lot of the humor of Long Live the Queen comes from the disconnect between its glossy, cute presentation and the absolute grimness of its storyline. Your viewpoint character, Elodie, is in constant peril from a variety of forces both natural and supernatural, and only a ruthless optimization of the character-advancement mechanics can save her. However, it's not exactly a gripping tale of suspense.

There's no real sense of building dread. Though a lot of the events seem connected to each other in subtle and surprising ways, each week nevertheless feels like an atomic unit. You face your challenge and you either pass or your fail, but if you survive, the challenge's effect on the future is too opaque to really spare much thought to contemplate.

The repetition probably plays a roll as well. I must have gone through the day 3 snakebite event at least 20 times already and it has subsequently lost its power to move me. Events later in the game may still have the potential, but even then, by the time I manage to get through them, I'll have read the lead-up events a half-dozen times and my mood will lean more towards curiosity about the ending than true engagement with the story.

My opinion of Long Live the Queen is still evolving, but I think it's more of an idle curiosity than a great game qua game or story qua story. The path to get through the plot is too winding, it doubles back on itself too often. And the skill you need to master to advance is a weird combination of memorization and time management. I like its unique combination of sweetness and grimness, but the actual game itself, I could take it or leave it.

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About the Blog

I have an excessively large Steam library, and I'm a little embarrassed to confess that I have not played most of them nearly as much as I should (some I have not played at all). Thus this blog was conceived - I will play my entire Steam Library, spending at least 20 hours on each game. And then I'll write about them.

2 games to go

An Offer to Developers

If you send me a review copy of your game, I will play it, and I will write at least one post about it. I won't necessarily go the same 20 hours as I do with the main blog games, but I'll do my best to give it a fair shake and experience all it has to offer.

This is mainly directed to small, struggling indie developers seeking feedback on unfinished or unsuccessful projects, but in the unlikely event that someone from a big-time studio stumbles across my blog and has a project they want to share, the offer extends to anyone who is involved in making a game.

The point of this offer is to help people find and build an audience by creating a review and commentary that you can link to as part of your promotion for the game. I can't deliver much of an audience, but I'm guessing that if you're in the position where my opinion seems valuable to you, then every little bit counts.

About Me

I am a creature of the night - Blah!
Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but I do work the night shift, and I have a lot of time on my hands. Time to do things like, say, blogging.
I like to pretend it's a type of productivity.